evaluation

Evaluation questions

In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

For our music video we decided as a team to choose a song by a German band called Tenbucks, the song was called “mayday” we thought this was the best choice as when we listened to all the tracks, we thought it was the best one and we all immediately liked it and had lots of ideas that we thought we could do for the video. As a group we picked the song out of a list of seven tracks that we were given I our class.

I think that our product used the conventions that we were given, such as Goodwin’s points because it follows them well, one of the points was selling the artist, we did this in our video by giving the main character (the artist) the most screen time, and only had the second character (love interest) in some sections of the video, which kept the attention on the artist, this helps to sell the artist because people remember his face and what he looks like from the video.  

 We all had ideas for what we wanted to have on the music video and from looking at previous students work and music videos from famous artists we found inspiration from famous artist’s songs theses were, “I’d rather be with you” by Joshua Radin and “Hero” by Enrique Iglesias’s, we liked theses two songs because they had the style, features and content in them that our group had thought about and we wanted to include in our music video, such as in Joshua Radin’s video of “I’d rather be with you” there is a clip of him sitting by a river playing his guitar and singing, which fitted perfectly with the style and sound of our song so we wanted to incorporate that into ours. We analysed the song by Joshua Radin and wrote down ideas and points that we thought were effective and liked to include in our video, such as flash backs and guitar shots.

We used voyeurism in our music video because we had the characters in costume that suited the style and genre of the song which was pop-rock, our main character wore skinny jeans and a shirt. As the song is a quite slow song we had a mixture of longs and short cuts between shots which looks good.

The lyrics fit well with the visuals, because when the main character is singing about his love for the love interest they are together. And when he is sitting or standing on his own playing the guitar it is in the slow or sad parts of the song which when you watch and listen to the music video really fits well.

How effective is the combination of your main production and ancillary texts?

The combination of the three products, the music video its self, the magazine advert and the DVD digi pack look and fit well together and relate well to the genre, this is because it promotes the artist without being  full of pictures of him as he features in two of the three products, the guitar is a strong feature in the video so we thought it would be a good item to put in one of the three products and we decided that it fitted best in the magazine advert as it is selling the artist because he plays the guitar in the video and people will remember that, it is involved with the whole promotional package but doesn’t take away from the feel of it all. The image that the product creates of the artist is good image as it shows him in the woods, which is in the music video when the artist and the second character are walking arm in arm thought he woods.  All three of the products tie in together as they have to wood theme which runs through all of them and the ancillary texts have something in them from the music video (artist, guitar and woodland)

It is successful in attracting the target audience, because it has the rating of the music video on the cover of the digi pack which we decided as a group to put as a U as it doesn’t have any contexnbt that would be inappropriate for children such as bad language and content of a sexual nature.

On the magazine we have included the name of the band and what you can expect to see in the digi pack, also where you will be able to purchase the digi pack which we put as on iTunes and HMV which are the best and most used places now to buy music. We also wrote a rating from a magazine that the music video would be talked about in and a star rating that the magazine gave it.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

From the feedback that we were given for all of our products, the pitch, the rough cut and the final music video were mostly positive but some negative criticism that we needed to take onboard to help us improve the products. The audience thought that our pitch was good and that we had a lot of good ideas and that it could look good if we made sure we followed through with the ideas.

For the rough cut the audience thought that we had some good ideas such as the flash backs because it fit well with the song and they thought that we used a good range of shots, and that it was the beginning of a really good music video, but they did say that there was no lip syncing as we hadn’t put any in at that time, and the guitar sections needed to be cleaner as at some points it was obvious he wasn’t playing it as it didn’t fit with the guitar of the track, they said that they ideas and shots were good but different shots were needed and the shots we had needed to be improved they thought that we had a good story line running through with the main and second character. They said that there were some areas that we needed to improve on.

On our final music video the audience feedback was positive, they thought that we had a good range of ideas and we followed them though well, they liked the range of shots that we had and said that they thought that the short and long shots work well. Some people thought that the lighting was good but as we filmed during the day the light was pretty good but we made sure that we had good light where we were and made sure that we weren’t in dark or little light but some people did think that it could have been improved. They thought that the flashbacks were effective and liked how we changed the colour to show a different time period. They thought that the story line was good and they really felt the emotion from the two characters and the acting was good.  Some people commented that our camera angles were simple but effective. People thought that the continuity editing was well edited. The negative feedback that we received was that the guitar sync could have been improved as it was out of time in some areas, and the lip syncing needed improvement as it was sometimes out of time. Some thought that the argument was too short and they would have liked to have seen it play out longer through the video. They also said that our main character didn’t seem very confident singing and didn’t put very much effort into it.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation?

Technology is extremely important to help us with the making and the running of the project, if we didn’t have the use of the Macs every lesson we would have found it hard to complete everything as we used them for mostly every aspect of the project.

For the construction of our music video we used the Macs at college to do mostly everything such as edit the shots that we took when we went out filming, which we filmed on the school HD video cameras which gave us high quality videos and shots which without the quality we couldn’t have produced the music video at a high standard, we used final cut to edited the shots that we took and put them on a time line with the track to make the music video. For the research we use the internet such as Google and YouTube and CD’s that we were given by our teacher. For the digi pack we used iphoto to choose the pictures that we took using the college cameras and Photoshop to manipulate the photos to how we wanted them to look on our ancillary texts.

For the planning we used blogger which is what the college uses for everyone to blog and keep track of what is going on, we blogged our ideas for the music video and what we did in the lessons and things such as analysis of artists and music videos and evaluations also we used it to put all of our work that we had done such as the ancillary texts and the music videos (rough cuts) etc. We also tried out photo booth as we thought we needed a picture so we took it in the lesson but realised that it wasn’t what we wanted.